Engaging activities that work #1

This series of blogs is a compendium of activities that I find work well in the classroom. It grew out of a desire to document all the best things I use in my teaching, week in week out, so that I could pick and choose from a list to ensure that things were kept fresh, different and exciting. Clearly any activity has to be chosen carefully to aid the learning that a lesson sets out to deliver, and some will be more effective than others depending on the types of classes and the individuals that make them up.

When I started teaching, planning very much involved planning for tasks and activities rather than for the learning that was taking place. In fact, I don’t think I ever thought explicitly about the abstract learning that children were doing; rather I designed tasks that I thought just made interesting and exciting ways…